This accessible introduction to formal, and especially Montague, semantics within a linguistic framework, presupposes no previous background in logic, but takes students step-by-step from simple predicate/argument structures and their interpretation to Montague's intentional logic.

In this paper we adopt the hypothesis that languages are mechanisms for interaction, and that grammars encode the means by which such interaction may take place, by use of procedures that construct representations of meaning from strings of words uttered in context, and conversely strings of words are built up from representations of content in interaction with context. In a review of the systemic use of ellipsis in dialogue and associated split-utterance phenomena, we show how, in Dynamic Syntax, words give (...) rise to a range of procedures for the building of representations of the content of some utterance, which both speakers and hearers use. We then extend the discussion to take account of adjuncts, showing how they contribute to content construction both in single utterances and across speakers. The same mechanisms are then shown to underlie the building of inferential extensions of meaning in context, giving rise to the creation of the ad hoc concepts expressed by phrases or single words in relation to the utterance context and ultimately to the creation of metaphorical uses of language. (shrink)

The study of meaning in language has developed dramatically over the last fifty years. Semantics is distinctive as it not only presents a general introduction to the topic, including the most recent developments, but it also provides a unique perspective for addressing current issues. It opens by introducing readers to the study of logic as the background against which developments have taken place. This demonstrates the link between semantics and the study of reasoning and how this view can provide new (...) solutions to the puzzles that have plagued the approaches presented in other textbooks. The major subject areas of semantics are discussed, including quantification, anaphora and discourse, tense and aspect, ellipsis and context, and word meaning. The book also presents state-of-the-art research in topics at the forefront of semantics. (shrink)

This volume, the first of its kind written in English, interprets the realistic-phenomenological philosophy of Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966). She was a prominent figure in the Munich-Göttingen Circle, the first generation of phenomenology after Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and was known as the “first lady of German philosophy”.The articles included in this collection deal with the two main themes constituting her realistic-metaphysical phenomenology: Being and the I. The new edition includes an additional chapter opening a new path into the study of Conrad-Martius (...) with Heidegger. In addition, the collection includes a comprehensive Introduction that describes the personal background and the social and philosophical contexts behind Conrad-Martius’s thought, with an emphasis on the mutual influence and fertilization of the group of early phenomenologists in the Munich-Göttingen Circle. The book is aimed at scholars of philosophy and educated readers. (shrink)

In response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the implicature. In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but (...) also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory. In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not. (shrink)

How can finite creatures know an infinite God? How do the limits of our intellect and language impact how we know God and talk about God? This book explores a doctrine called divine incomprehensibility in hopes to seek how a proper understand of God's incomprehensibility protects us from both a theological despair in which there is no hope for Christian theology and a theological idolatry in which we are tempted to believe we can capture the essence of God with our (...) thoughts or words. (shrink)

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in (...) discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar. (shrink)

Laozi Laozi is the name of a legendary Daoist philosopher, the alternate title of the early Chinese text better known in the West as the Daodejing, and the moniker of a deity in the pantheon of organized “religious Daoism” that arose during the later Han dynasty. Laozi is … Continue reading Laozi →.

Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics If Chinese philosophy may be said to have begun around 2000 B.C.E., then it represents the longest continuous heritage of philosophical reflection. Trying to mention each philosopher or every significant thinker is not possible. This article is highly selective by choosing philosophers according to two basic principles: Those who … Continue reading Chinese Philosophy: Overview of Topics →.

Daoist Philosophy Along with Confucianism, “Daoism” is one of the two great indigenous philosophical traditions of China. As an English term, Daoism corresponds to both Daojia, an early Han dynasty term which describes so-called “philosophical” texts and thinkers such as Laozi and … Continue reading Daoist Philosophy →.

Wellbeing in schools is often focused at the individual level, exploring students’ or teachers’ individual traits, habits, or actions that influence wellbeing. However, studies rarely take a whole-school approach that includes staff wellbeing, and frequently ignore relational and organizational level variables. We take a systems informed positive psychology approach and argue that it is essential to build greater understanding about organizational and relational influences on wellbeing in order for schools to support educator wellbeing. Our study evaluated the relative contributions of (...) individual, relational, and organizational factors to educator wellbeing. Our measure of wellbeing focused on the life satisfaction and flourishing of 559 educators in 12 New Zealand schools. We used a social network analysis approach to capture educators’ relational ties, and demographic data and psychometric scales to capture individual and organizational level variables. Results of hierarchical blockwise regressions showed that individual, relational, and organizational factors were all significantly associated with educator wellbeing; however, it was educators’ perceptions of trusting and collaborative school conditions that were most strongly associated with their wellbeing. The number of relational ties educators had explained the least amount of variance in wellbeing. Educators were more likely to experience high levels of support when their close contacts also experienced high levels of support. However, for many educators, there was a negative association between their most frequent relational ties and their reported levels of support. Our results suggest that attending to the organizational factors that influence wellbeing, through creating trusting and collaborative school conditions, may be one of the most influential approaches to enhancing educator wellbeing. We call for whole-school approaches to wellbeing that not only consider how to support and enhance the wellbeing of school staff as well as students, but also view the conditions created within a school as a key driver of wellbeing within schools. (shrink)

This collection will appeal to scholars and students of social and legal theory, visual culture, justice and governance studies, media studies, and criminology.

This article addresses both philosophers of science and process philosophers. It shows that the acceptance of Einstein's general theory of relativity by British physicists in the early 1920s, and their rejection of Whitehead's experimentally indistinguishable theory of gravity, was a matter not only of empirical evaluation but also of aesthetic preference. To philosophers of science it offers a historical case study illustrating the entangled roles of empirical and aesthetic criteria in theory evaluation. To process philosophers it offers an answer to (...) the question of why Whitehead's alternative rendering of Einstein's general relativity has been neglected both by the majority of physicists, and by the majority of philosophers. (shrink)

A well known logical loophole for Bell’s theorem is that it relies on setting independence: the assumption that the state of a system is independent of the settings of a measurement apparatus probing the system. In this paper the implications of rejecting this assumption are studied from an operationalist perspective. To this end a generalization of the ontic models framework is proposed that allows setting dependence. It is shown that within this framework Bell’s theorem reduces to the conclusion that no-signaling (...) requires randomness at the epistemic level even if the underlying ontology is taken to be deterministic. The ideas underlying the framework are further used to defend setting dependence against the charges of being incompatible with free will and scientific methodology. The paper ends however with the sketch of a new problem for setting dependence: a necessary gap between the ontic and the epistemic level that may prevent the formulation of a successful setting dependent theory. (shrink)

The key work of the early Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the Grundlage ser gesammten Wissenschaftslehre [Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science] of 1794-95. The very circumstances of its publication ensure that it is a rather terse and disjointed statement of Fichtean philosophy. It consists of a very short preface, a “famous” section devoted to first principles, the so-called “basic propositions of the entire doctrine of science,” and eight discourses of widely diverging length. The first discourse, devoted to the “theoretical” (...) Wissenschaftslehre is one and a half times the length of the other seven. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth are barely a few pages long. It is an extremely peculiar work and not merely due to the circumstances of its publication. Its very argumentative structure threatens to trap the reader in forming hasty and preliminary judgements on the exact nature of the philosophical claims being made, and, quite specifically, those philosophical claims which might be ascribed to the author himself. The following contends that lack of attention to the structure of a work that, admittedly, exhibits very little in an overt fashion has led to wholesale confusion about the early system and its philosophical intent. Specifically, that too much attention has been paid to the famous section on grounding principles, and, furthermore, that attention only to these sections will lead to fundamental confusion and misunderstanding. This paper will attempt to examine this peculiar Fichtean text via the readings made by Dieter Henrich and Frederick Neuhouser, respectively. (shrink)

The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a problem since its founding days. A large contribution to the discussion of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics is given by the so-called impossibility proofs for hidden variable models; models that allow a realist interpretation. In this thesis some of these proofs are discussed, like von Neumann’s Theorem, the Kochen-Specker Theorem and the Bell-inequalities. Some more recent developments are also investigated, like Meyer’s nullification of the Kochen-Specker Theorem, the MKC-models and Conway and Kochen’s (...) Free Will Theorem. This last one is taken to suggest that the problems that arise for certain interpretations of quantum mechanics are not limited to realist interpretations only, but also affect certain instrumentalist interpretations. It is argued that one may arrive at a more satisfying interpretation of quantum mechanics if one adopts a logic that seems more compatible with the instrumentalist viewpoint namely, intuitionistic logic. The motivations for adopting this form of logic rather than classical logic or quantum logic are linked to some of the philosophical ideas of Bohr. In particular a new interpretation of Bohr’s notion of complementarity is proposed. Finally some possibilities are explored for linking the intuitionistic interpretation of quantum mechanics to the mathematical formalism of the theory. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘civil association’ and ‘enterprise association’ has inspired international society theorists to conceive of international society as not just a ‘purposive association’ constructed by states to satisfy their interests but also as a ‘practical association’ providing formal and pragmatic rules that are not instrumental to particular goals of state policy. While this article is supportive of the Oakeshottian turn in international society theory, it suggests that somewhat different conclusions can be drawn from it. The article sketches out (...) an alternative conception of international ‘civil association’, one that transcends the boundaries of communities. It is argued that such a notion of civil association is both possible and at the same time anchored in the experiences of the modern state. It is suggested that this notion of international civil association, when sustained by an adequate legal conception, promotes the enforcement of moral and political responsibility acr... (shrink)

In this article we explore a self-regulatory perspective on the self-evaluative moral emotions, shame and guilt. Broadly conceived, self-regulation distinguishes between two types of motivation: approach/activation and avoidance/inhibition. We use this distinction to conceptually understand the socialization dimensions (parental restrictiveness versus nurturance), associated emotions (anxiety versus empathy), and forms of morality (proscriptive versus prescriptive) that serve as precursors to each self-evaluative moral emotion. We then examine the components of shame and guilt experiences in greater detail and conclude with more general (...) implications of a self-regulatory perspective on moral emotions. (shrink)

This paper was read at the First Conference of the ISSEI, ‘Turning Points in History’, 26–30 September 1988, Amsterdam. It pertains to theme 2, ‘popular and Elite Culture’.